The House in the Pines(60)

She was relieved to find, when she got home, that her mom hadn’t woken in the two hours or so since Maya had taken the car without permission. She poured herself a glass of orange juice for the vitamin C, then added about half the gin to help her sleep. She brought the drink to bed with her, quickly drank it, then sank into the pillowy mattress. Her hands and feet tingled as her blood thawed, and before long, she began to pass out.

She was tempted to ignore her phone when it rang, let it go to voicemail, let the gin pull her under, but then it occurred to her that she hadn’t called her job this morning to tell them she was still sick. If that was her boss on the phone, Maya had to answer—she couldn’t afford, on top of everything else, to get fired. Her hand shot out from beneath the blankets.

When she saw the caller ID, the relief hit her as hard as the gin. “Dan!” she gushed.

“Hey . . .”

“How—how are you?”

“All right, I guess. Halfway through exams.”

He didn’t sound as overjoyed or relieved as she felt. “I’m sure you’re killing it,” she said weakly.

“Listen, sorry I didn’t text you back.”

Her chest tightened. “That’s okay, I know you have a lot going on.”

He said nothing.

She didn’t breathe. Maybe if neither of them spoke, the conversation would end, and they could go back to the way things were.

“What’s going on with you, Maya?”

She wanted to tell him what she’d remembered tonight—she’d been carrying it too long on her own. But to tell him now would be to risk coming across as she had seven years ago, as though she were suggesting that Frank had cast some sort of spell on her, made her see things that weren’t there.

It remained true that what he’d done felt like magic.

“See?” Dan said. “You don’t want to tell me, do you?”

“Please,” she said, her voice filling with tears. “I do, it’s just that—”

“Right,” he said flatly. “I’m sure you have your reasons, and look, I respect that. But honestly, this isn’t what I signed up for. I don’t want the kind of relationship where we feel like we have to hide things from—”

“I’m going through Klonopin withdrawal.”

“I’m sorry, what?”

She’d been looking for the right time to tell him, always at some future point, but the moment had never come, and though the word for what Frank had done to her stayed mired in a strange, foggy soup, the rest of what was going on in her mind felt surprisingly clear as the words fell from her lips.

“Jesus,” Dan said when she was done. “I don’t get it. Why would you hide all that from me?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “It didn’t seem important when we met, so I didn’t mention it, and then I . . . kept not mentioning it until it started to feel weird. Like, why had I waited so long?”

Dan sighed.

“I wish we could talk about this in person,” she said, wanting to hold him, but glad he couldn’t see her this way.

“So that’s why you got sick at my parents’ house.”

“Yes.”

He fell quiet again.

“I’m so sorry . . .”

“I could have helped you through it.”

“The thing is I was lying to myself too. I didn’t want to be taking Wendy’s pills anymore. I knew they were clouding my thinking, making me forgetful. I knew they were dangerous to mix with alcohol, but I’ve been doing that pretty much every night for years. And I didn’t want that reality to be true, so I pretended it wasn’t.”

“Oh, Maya . . .”

“I’m sorry.”

“You’ve been drinking tonight, haven’t you?”

The disappointment in his voice stung. Of course he could hear the four shots of gin she’d just downed. She thought of explaining that she needed it to sleep but felt lucid enough to see that this was a poor excuse. “Yes,” she whispered.

This time he was silent for so long that she had time to consider the two paths he might take. Seeing as how she obviously needed help, he might, on the one hand, choose to stand by her no matter what, help her through this.

Or he could say that it was all too much, that she was too much, throw up his hands, and walk away.

“You have a problem,” he said slowly. “What are you going to do about it?”

Her tears were messy now, her nose running down her face, but her chest filled with gratitude because there was kindness in his voice. “I’ll get help,” she said. “I will. As soon as I get back to Boston.”

“What kind of help?”

“I don’t know, a psychiatrist? Or a therapist. Some kind of doctor.”

“I have an uncle in AA. I think that’s what you should do.”

“But I’m not an alcoholic,” she said, instinctively defensive.

“Really? You got drunk at my mom’s birthday the other night. Now here you are again.”

She couldn’t argue with that.

“And all this week . . . Of course I knew something was wrong. And you—you hid it from me. You’ve been taking pills behind my back, making yourself sick with how much you’ve been drinking. You’re hurting yourself, Maya. You can’t hide it anymore.”